No one else seemed to notice this shadow but me. From the Muslims were echoed exclamations thanking Allah, and even the most hopeful of foreign observers would be forced to write to his sovereign that the Turkish threat was strong for a good many years more.
And perhaps my eyes were swayed by something I saw more clearly than the vagaries of flesh. Around his left wrist, which he flourished self-consciously whenever the opportunity presented itself, Muhammed had tied a white napkin. There would have been nothing so very remarkable in this were it not for the fact that I recognized the rough-trying-to-be-careful stitch along one edge. I had seen Gul Ruh thread her needle to take that stitch. I realized at once just how surely the two weeks of glorious entertainments had distracted me from the most important maneuvers of all—those inside the harem.
The Sultan addressed his son in Persian and then Arabic; in both languages the boy acquitted himself fluently. Then the Shadow of Allah posed several questions on the poets, religion, and finally politics. Only in the latter was the young Prince’s response less than perfect. He failed to reflect the results of last year’s campaign in an answer concerning the Persian borders. As this displayed more concern with dusty textbooks than with practical knowledge, the teachers were chided. But the boy was not. The father himself put more weight on poetry than on politics.
“After all,” the monarch explained, “there are always soldiers around in a hurry to correct you on such matters. But what man has ever seen to the full depth of a poem?”
“And what poem to the depth of a woman’s heart?” replied the young Prince in improvised meter and rhyme that delighted all hearers.
The wave of his wrist as he spoke did not delight me. My hand closed reflexively on my dagger. But whom was I supposed to attack?
“Quite so, my boy. Quite so,” the Sultan replied with a chuckle and laid a fatherly hand on the lad’s shoulder. He seemed ready to say more perhaps about the boy’s own mother—but that would have been indiscreet in company. So, “We shall talk more,” the Sultan said instead. “Before you go off to the duties of a man in the sandjak of Magnesia, we must talk more.”
“Nothing would honor me more, sir,” Muhammed said.
I left my station as soon as I dared and hurried back to the bowels of the Serai.
LIX
“What is this sudden change of heart that you now look with such favor on your cousin?”
Gul Ruh met me with a face I could not ruffle with the anger of accusations. Yes, she had seen her cousin several times. Safiye, who always acted as chaperon, had insisted. The boy’s courage needed bolstering, she said, to enable him to face this ordeal. Almost nothing could be wrong on the part of either male or female, she recited, that brought another Muslim to the age and strength of fighting for the Faith. I could find no argument to that.
I noticed new jewels on my young lady’s neck and wrists. I also noticed she had acquired the same hot spots of color in her cheeks that Safiye and her son had. But instead of a healthy cavalry riding alert on the saddle of cheekbones, hers seemed to be the flush of a fever, blotchy and smeared like bad makeup with tears.
She is intoxicated, I thought, drugged like the foreign ambassadors by the glory of this show Murad’s court can put on. Pray Allah it is not a permanent addiction and may be slept off as soon as the last of the bunting is down.
Then I learned that Umm Kulthum had been in the Serai and had been treated not rudely, but with such decided neglect that she had found the festivities were better seen from her own home and had not returned. I bit my tongue in anger and glared hard at Safiye whenever our paths had to cross. But I said nothing.
I defiantly stayed in the harem after this, but if I wanted to make a point by self-sacrifice, the point was in vain. Now that the Prince had been presented, what was left to see was minor.
On the fourteenth day in the morning, Muhammed was brought into a pavilion heavily hung with brocade and splashing with fountains. And then, as one hundred holy men recited the Koran for the spectators all at the top of their lungs and all at different paces, the boy was made a man. The operation was announced, by the grace of Allah, as clean and successful. Murad celebrated and, incidentally, covered up any wounded wails there might have been (although I am assured there were none) by calling for two great vases filled with coins. Four men each were required to carry the vessels and the sovereign dispensed the contents to the scrambling populace.
The afternoon grew hot. For those still in search of diversion there were philosophical debates and recitations of the traditions of the Prophet, but the harem had little taste for such things and preferred to debate among themselves on more personal topics.
The afternoon grew hotter still—was this heat what the astrologers had seen when they picked the most auspicious day?—and word was brought from the circumcision pavilion that the Prince was in fever. His mother, nurses, and eunuchs had been there from the moment the holy man with his razor left. But now reinforcements were called for.
Safiye called for Gul Ruh by name. “To comfort her cousin in his distress,” were the words. My young lady rose at once to oblige and at first I let her go without comment because I had never heard of a bride comforting her groom on his circumcision bed. The duties of a bride came later, after the healing. Still, on second thought, I insisted on going with her. She grumbled a bit, but
